Why does Destiny 2 (PC, PS4, Xbox One) feel so unsatisfying and incomplete? Apparently, an important idea is missing from the game’s weapon system. It was not completed in time. This could be the root of all evil.
It sounds exaggerated, but one can say: Millions of people have been asking in recent weeks what is actually wrong with Xur’s tentacle beard in Destiny 2.
What is actually wrong with Destiny 2?
Questions plague the guardians of Destiny 2:
- Why doesn’t the game feel right?
- Where has the magic gone?
- Why could I spend hours in Destiny 1 with the same content, while in Destiny 2 I got bored after 80 hours?
The search for answers to these questions leads to a statement from Game Director Luke Smith from June 2017. He told the website Mashable: “There are no random rolls on weapons in Destiny 2. A weapon is only available in a single configuration. Period.”
Random rolls were removed for balancing reasons
In Destiny 1, it was still possible for an item to appear with different perk combinations. This made the second, third, or fourteenth drop of a legendary weapon exciting, as this version of the weapon could better fit one’s playstyle.
That’s why players farmed the same content countless times in the hopes of finding the perfect weapon, the God Roll. With this trick, the collection game of Destiny 1 was nearly endless.
The decision to forgo this in Destiny 2 came out of necessity. They wanted to simplify balancing. If every weapon was “hand-made”, they thought Bungie could balance the game better in June 2017.
Bungie six months ago: This is a question we urgently need to answer, but then nothing happened
Already then, Luke Smith added: “How can we make the second and third drop of a weapon interesting? That is a question we should be asking ourselves. And we should answer it as quickly as possible.”
Bungie has been failing to provide an answer until this evening. For a while, it was thought that this idea could be the “mod system” of Destiny 2, but it turned out to be pretty flat and unexciting.
Smith further added in June: “We have ideas for this. I would love nothing more than to talk about these ideas now, but we are working against a deadline. I don’t know if we can realize the idea by the release. But we have ideas that we find exciting.”
Apparently, Bungie missed this deadline, and the game was released without the “exciting idea”. A fatal mistake, as it turned out.
In mid-October, Luke Smith referred to this mysterious idea a second time. By then, the problems with Destiny 2’s endgame were already apparent.
In October, Luke Smith said in an interview: “We know we have problems in that area that we need to address. We need to recognize that duplicates have significance. That is still one of the things for which we have ideas.”
Today we learn: What is the exciting idea?
Since then, players have been asking: What is this idea? How does Bungie want to make loot exciting without resorting to random rolls? This evening we should finally receive the answer to that question.
The question that was already “urgently wanted to be answered” six months ago is likely to be the topic of the hour today.
Update: The idea is now known; they are masterwork weapons:
